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Tuesday 9 February 2010

Mind Your Language

Queens' College, Cambridge or Queens' College, Cambridge

I was interested by a note on the website of Queens’ College, Cambridge, because the use of the apostrophe in English is governed by such simple rules that it is hard to see how there can be much dispute about it.

The college says that everyone is told to spell it Queens’ College because it was founded by two Queens of England: Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI, in 1448, and Elizabeth Woodville, the wife Edward IV, in 1465. But the college adds quite correctly that an apostrophe to indicate the possessive is ‘of no great antiquity’. (It is much more recent than the foundation of the college.)

The archivists of Queens’ find that the earliest examples of the name spelt with any apostrophe always have the apostrophe before the ‘s’. Indeed, the first example of Queens’ College is from 1823. In the University Calendar, the spelling was changed from Queen’s to Queens’ in 1831.

A further complication is suggested by Erasmus always calling his college Collegium Reginae. Reginae means ‘of the Queen’, not ‘of the Queens’. The formal title remains today: the Queen’s College of St Margaret and St Bernard, commonly called Queens’ College, in the University of Cambridge.

This is interesting, but how the name was once spelt does not determine how it should be spelled today. If it is commonly called Queens’ College, after two queens, that is correct. By contrast, as I’ve mentioned before, the spelling St Thomas’ Hospital, displayed in letters 12ft high opposite Parliament, is a daily reproach. They still haven’t changed it, but it cannot be right. Even my husband can see that. The hospital is always pronounced with Thomas’s as three syllables. One dim administrator did defend the form Thomas’ by saying that it referred to more than one St Thomas (Becket and the Apostle). But the plural of Thomas is Thomases, so the possessive plural would be spelt Thomases’.

In Oxford, Queen’s College has the eccentricity of preferring to carrying round a definite article, and even capitalising the initial ‘t’ in the middle of sentences, as: The Queen’s College. It seems not to insist on this, though.

What to do with a definite article in proper names is not always clear. The Strand, for example, is called Strand on the street-sign. To me it seems silly of the Court Circular to write ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’, with a capital ‘T’. And I also enjoy saying ‘the Albany’ or ‘the Guildhall’ to épater the pedants, who eschew the article altogether in these names.

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